Well, I just woke up and am about to go off to meet with my professor soon. Every year about this time I think about that line from the song, Split Personality. I think it is by an alternative black rock group called Basehead. And the line goes "My pride is racist/people say/ yet no one minds/St. Patrick's Day"
On a somewhat unrelated note, now in North America there seems to be an issue playing itself out in a number of ways. What does Progressive Islam mean? What does it mean to be a Progressive Muslim? The specific issue these days is whether it is permissible for a woman to lead a Friday prayer with mixed-genders and/or give the khutbah. Also, this is only "somewhat" unrelated to the above because, if I understood the story correctly, the woman in question this time was Amina Wadud, the African-American Muslim woman who wrote the book "The Quran and Women" about how to re-approach the Quran in ways that are more liberating to women.
When (Or if) America finally develops a specifically American Muslim culture, a very large component of that mix will be African-American. And it seems important and necessary to articulate what the relation is between being Muslim and being Black. There are wide, varied, deep, concrete intersections between the Muslim world and the Black world. But more work could be done to map out that territory.
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